TWEET of the day: broadcaster and cleric Rev Richard Coles disclosed on Twitter that he played host to a group of Year 6 schoolkids.

'What's the oldest thing here?' he asked them, standing next to a pre-Conquest yew in the churchyard. 'Is it you, Father Richard?', one of them piped up.

BET this never happened to Liz McColgan-Nuttall in Scotland.

Liz now runs an athletics club for kids in Doha, Qatar. Daughter Eilish recently visited her, and blogged about it on her website.

One young Qatari boy, part of the country's Al-thani royal line, arrived with his Persian cat. It was, writes Eilish, the Beyonce of cats, perched on the boy's shoulder like a parrot, "staring at my mum as she asked all the kids to commence their warm-up jog."

The boy was about to start when Liz asked him to remove the cat. His nanny, who was present, asked if he could "run with the cat." Liz - who, after all, knows about such things - wisely said that he might be able to run much faster without a cat slowing him down. Result: the animal was placed in a waiting car.

YESTERDAY'S mention of Cliff Hanley prompted Gordon Casely to get in touch.

"Lovely bloke," he says. "He was a born wag, highly intelligent. Hated sport, though - he'd have rather run a mile than take part in sport."

One anecdote comes to mind. "In the subway, the rails rise up and down on the approach to each station - something to do when the subway trains were cable-hauled, back in the day," says Gordon. "That explanation wasn't good enough for Cliff, though. He'd always insist that it was related to the curvature of the earth."

READER Donald Macaskill was in a pub when the conversation drifted round to the fact that a new book-shop is soon to open on Byres Road. "An excellent time-saving device," the pub philologist/philosopher said. "Pop in, buy a book, stroll down the road, donate to charity shop, back to pub."

FOOTBALLERS' fragrances: Any fragrance connected with football or footballers is likely to be offensive to the olfactory receptors and, as such, it should be known as 'Scent Off', says John Mulholland.

STILL on football: Jim Wright was irritated at being stuck behind a parked lorry, delivering bags of potatoes to a chippie. But he brightened on learning that the bloke making the delivery was a Roma and Italian legend. "Well," reasons Jim, "the football jersey he was wearing had Totti on the back."

A (MALE) Diary reader got an insight into the size-zero controversy while shopping in the new Victoria's Secret shop at Glasgow airport.

Hoping to buy a surprise for his wife, he picked up a pair of knickers but realised that what he needed was a size 16.

"Have you anything larger than this?" he asked a slender shop assistant. She thought for a few moments. "Well," she said, "we go up to a size 12. They're quite roomy."

We think our reader, slightly nonplussed, made his purchase elsewhere.